I ABSURDIST-ETHICS and RADICAL AGENCY in AIDS CINEMA: EROTIC GENEALOGIES, ABSURD LAUGHTER, and GROTESQUE AESTHETICS Samantha M

ABSURDIST-ETHICS AND RADICAL AGENCY IN AIDS CINEMA: EROTIC GENEALOGIES, ABSURD LAUGHTER, AND GROTESQUE AESTHETICS Samantha Michele Riley A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Program of Comparative Literature. Chapel Hill 2013 Approved by: Juan Carlos González Espitia Inger S. B. Brodey María DeGuzmán Alice A. Kuzniar Jessica L. Wolfe i © 2013 Samantha Michele Riley ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT SAMANTHA MICHELE RILEY: Absurdist-Ethics and Radical Agency in AIDS Cinema: Erotic Genealogies, Absurd Laughter, and Grotesque Aesthetics (Under the direction of Juan Carlos González Espitia) Absurdist-Ethics and Radical Agency in AIDS Cinema explores a queer theory of ethics based in a grotesque humor aesthetic. Trans-historical and trans-cultural in nature, this project focuses on key examples from cinema, literature, and popular culture, illustrating the ethical paradigm of a postmodern absurdist-ethics. Drawing on theories of the absurd as a form of metaphysical revolt and notions of ethical relativity, the dissertation argues that Absurdist AIDS Cinema imagines a postmodern ethics in which the representation of radical modes of behavior offers, however controversially, not nihilism but affirmation. The cathartic choice to live absurdly is embodied through radical engagements with HIV in filmmakers’ Rosa von Praunheim’s A Virus Knows No Morals (Germany, 1985), Laura Muscardin’s Days (Italy, 2001), and Samy’s Animal (India, 2007). The assessment of AIDS humor, barebacking, and the virus fashioned through an aesthetic akin with grotesque humor, shows that AIDS should not be read simply as a living death sentence void of agency and meaning, but as a reimagining of ethical discourses surrounding quality of life. Vis-à-vis a postmodern climate, this study proposes an absurdist-ethics signaling that humans who embrace the absurd may wield agency and yield harmony and catharsis. In essence, an absurdist-ethics offers readers an interdisciplinary tool through which to discover a positive and invigorating refiguring of aesthetics within a postmodern paradigm. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES ................................................................................................................ v INTRODUCTION: SEEKING RADICAL AGENCY & AIDS .................................. 1 CHAPTER I: AIDS HUMOR: EIN VIRUS KENNT KEINE MORAL [A VIRUS KNOWS NO MORALS] 1985 ............................................................... 26 CHAPTER II: GROTESQUE AESTHETIC: MIRUGAM [ANIMAL] 2007 .............. 59 CHAPTER III: BAREBACKING IN CINEMA: GIORNI [DAYS] 2001 .................. 87 CHAPTER IV: IN CULTURAL PRACTICE: BAREBACKING AS RADICAL AESTHETIC INSTANTIATION ....................................................................... 127 CHAPTER V: ESPERPENTO AS RADICAL AGENT .......................................... 175 CONCLUSION: CIRCUS ........................................................................................ 214 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................... 222 iv LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. AIDS is a Mass Murderer Poster ...................................................................... 61 2. Fits on every cucumber! ..................................................................................... 61 3. Satirical Warning .............................................................................................. 131 4. Disparate alegre ................................................................................................ 186 v INTRODUCTION SEEKING RADICAL AGENCY & AIDS The working title of this work was “AIDS is Absurd,” which should indicate that this study is not a typical one. In most contexts, reports on HIV/AIDS focus on how to quell, overcome, or move beyond the trauma of the epidemic. Countless studies aim to identify the nature of the virus and theorize how to control and, if possible, eradicate its presence in the body. There are also many narratives, rendered and recorded in all types of media, that relate the story of those who have succumbed to AIDS, as well as those who have survived. Narratives that lend perspective on certain subgroups are also to be found. Since the mid 1980s, over two hundred contributions from all over the world to the genre of Global Queer AIDS Cinema have narrated stories about gay men infected with HIV. What makes Queer AIDS films particularly unique is the fact that a handful demonstrates the possibility for radical agency in the face of a deadly epidemic. In contrast, most fictional and non-fictional scholarly and popular renditions do not allow for such politically precarious gestures. A theory that promotes the negotiation of radical agency from HIV/AIDS is risky business. By agency, I do not mean activism or modes of survival. In theory, locating radical agency in HIV means the representation of politically potent and controversial images and ideas that engage with the aesthetics and ethics of death. Many people would surely find such depictions repulsive, politically dubious, and/or morally defunct. Indeed, the aesthetics of radical agency in and through death as I frame it here may be seen as equating to celebrating, indulging, and erotizing death. These may be extreme modes of engaging with the subject of AIDS, and yet, I propose that there is precedence in their exhibition, specifically with regards to a theory of ethics concerning endgame engagements. I call this theory an absurdist-ethics, which I argue one may trace throughout time, exhibited in response to moments of greater cultural trauma, including during times of epidemics, war, and genocide, as well as a retort to even the most culturally minor moments of individual human engagement with death, and in particular as related to those who participate in high-risk behaviors as modes of community formation. As I theorize in this paper, an absurdist-ethics is a theory of risk management, which equation includes the possibility of yielding a model of life lived more intensely by indulging in the absurd, in the grotesque, and in death. This viewpoint challenges hegemonic codes of ethics represented by ideals associated with the philosophical tradition of Western Enlightenment, rationalism, and Humanism, which dictates that life is to be valued above all, and that sickness and death should be avoided, possibly at any cost. At the same time, an absurdist ethics demonstrates a pervasive skepticism towards any transcendent notion of good or evil. Instead, my model relies much upon an existential philosophical stance, insofar as it explains why an individual would find humor in pain, erotize decay, and seek death, if it equates to finding agency, and/or as a means to foster community, and/or perchance to increase her or his quality of life. A theory of an absurdist-ethics edicts that one risks one’s life in order to acquire a standpoint of agency that may in theory yield catharsis, pleasure, and possibly, a multiplication or increase of one’s quality of life for the price of intensity. Vouching allegiance to such a theory may mean that the individual risks being misunderstood, loosing 2 political standing, as well as social and familial support as a result of the exhibition of such a radically unorthodox stance on life. I contend that a theory of an absurdist-ethics is not, however, unique to the AIDS epidemic, and must be set as well in relation to larger historical contexts of tragedy and catastrophe, times during which I believe this same code of ethics has been exhibited, at the very least in various cultural aesthetic forms of art. My project and its starting point focus on a specific cultural-temporal point of reference, with the subgenre of AIDS film in the corpus of Queer Cinema from the last thirty years. While conducting research in trends to the genre over time, I discovered the presence of instances of radical modes of agency, evidenced from the start, and up until the most recent additions to AIDS Cinema. I discovered three key films, each of which depicts a specific yet different metaphor of agency concerning HIV. These films may be dismissed as anomalies, but as I began to reflect on the political charge of each film, I came to the conclusion that the ethical core of each narrative is the same. When situated side-by-side, these films and their singular offerings of a narrative as a metaphor of agency via HIV render a comprehensive model that points to my understanding of an absurdist-ethics. When applying this model to the context of HIV/AIDS, one can better understand how the trauma of HIV and AIDS, individually and as a collective human epidemic, may be turned into an active production of complex forms of agency, a head-on engagement with the pain of one’s inevitable death and the body’s decimation: how and why one might, in forms of art and in modes of the ‘real,’ laugh, coddle, and/or acquiesce sexually to austere engagements with politically contentious narrations of cultural trauma such as the AIDS epidemic. 3 More specifically, from a Global Queer AIDS Cinema, I draw upon three metaphors of agency in HIV. The three images engage with the topic of the epidemic through an aesthetics of humor and the grotesque, as well as the eroticization of the virus marked by high-risk behavior, and instantiate my theory of a radical absurdist-ethics. In Chapter one, I introduce

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